Like Walter Hill, Peter Hyams is a workmanlike director with several efficient and entertaining movies under his belt. Capricorn One, Outlander, and Narrow Margin are crisp commercial fare with occasional flair. While Hyams does not have a masterpiece in his oeuvre, unlike Hill (The Long Riders), after watching this flawed debut, you feel one was in there.
Busting tracks its’ early buddy cop kin, Freebie and the Bean, but swaps out the verbose and frenetic James Caan and Alan Arkin for the dour and focused Elliott Gould and Robert Blake. The latter are two LA vice detectives who are becoming disillusioned with the pointlessness of rousting massage parlors, gay bars and porno shops. They become obsessed with a corrupt crime lord (Alan Garfield) who thwarts their work by paying off the cops, politicians, and judges.
It’s an uneven picture, sometimes quietly comic, then discordantly violent. The camera work, however, is superb. In particular, a stunning extended foot chase shootout through Grand Central Market at night. The dolly shot was filmed decades before the pool scene in Boogie Nights and the nightclub scene in Goodfellas and was made all the more difficult because the leads flow, dodge and weave through dozens of terrified extras screaming and crouching as bullets whiz about. The scene is not an anomaly. Hyams has a deft feel and eye that portended a more illustrious career.
Other notes.
Gould is an LA detective who wears a Washington Redskins winter hat, which is cool.
As with Freebie and the Bean, if they showed this politically incorrect picture at Oberlin, the student body would revolt.
The movie is also said to have been the inspiration for Starsky and Hutch.
During the shootout, Hyams does things often ignored in such scenes. People fall. An innocent bystander get shot. And lo and behold, both Blake and Gould reload their revolvers.
Quentin Tarantino’s take:
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